Our View: Rauner should give his own budget address

It’s easy to criticize Gov. Pat Quinn’s broken promises, but it’s much more difficult to show potential voters what can and/or should be done to right Illinois’ fiscal ship.

Quinn will give his budget address Wednesday — a month later than scheduled — and there undoubtedly will be difficult and unpopular choices in his spending plan.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner should seize the opportunity to show Illinoisans how he would do things differently.

On Monday, Rauner’s campaign issued a news release titled “Pat Quinn’s Broken Promises.” Lost jobs, lost household income and the inability of the state to pay its bills were three of the failures mentioned.

How Rauner would fix those problems would make for an interesting rebuttal to Quinn’s speech. He touted some of his ideas during his successful primary campaign and displays them on his website. We’d like to see him get more specific.

The “temporary” tax increase is merely one subject that must be addressed. Will Quinn allow it to expire or make it permanent, or does he have another idea such as Speaker of the House Mike Madigan’s proposed tax on millionaires?

Rauner wants to get rid of the tax hike and overhaul Illinois’ tax code so that it’s “fair to all taxpayers.” That includes revamping property taxes. We know what Rauner wants to “get rid of” but what will be left? Supporters of a progressive income tax think that’s fairer to taxpayers, but we doubt that’s what Rauner has in mind.

In general terms, we know Rauner wants lower taxes, less regulation and tort reform. How to accomplish that and whittle away at Illinois’ debt, pension liability and stack of unpaid bills would be quite a challenge.

Illinois residents want it all. They want their taxes cut and they don’t want to see services reduced, according to the latest poll from the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University.

More than 60 percent of those who responded to the survey opposed making the tax hike permanent. If cutting taxes increased the state’s deficit, too bad. Almost 74 percent still opposed or strongly opposed making the income tax increase permanent, even with the threat of larger budget deficits,

It would be impossible for Quinn or Rauner to satisfy all Illinoisans, but which of the two has the better plan to restore the state’s credit rating if not its prosperity?

Bad news seems to be permanently attached to Illinois. Illinois’s 8.7 percent unemployment rate is well above the national 6.7 percent rate. Illinois is tied with Nevada with the nation’s second-highest jobless rate. Rhode Island is the worst, at 9.2 percent.

The number of Illinois children living in poverty also is a shameful statistic. The child poverty rate in Illinois jumped to 21.6 percent in 2011, up from 19.4 percent in 2010 and 15.4 percent in 2000, according to Voices for Illinois Children, an advocacy organization that has been around since 1987.

We’ll get an idea of how Quinn proposes to change that kind of bad news. Rauner surely will release a statement after the governor’s speech, and we hope that it’s specific enough so voters have a better idea of who has the best budget approach.